Listen! Can You Hear Me? Unheard Voices: A Critical Ethnography of College Practitioners’ Perspectives and Experiences Working in a Competency-Based Mediated Environment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The expansion of neoliberal globalization has influenced the marketization of education and led the charge to shape competency-based educational policies. In Québec, Canada, public school curricula have mandated competency-based education (CBE) to address and remedy student retention rates and employability concerns. While the stated goal proposed by reform policies for instituting CBE is to eliminate social and economic inequities, teachers are concerned that it may exacerbate inequality gaps among our most vulnerable populations. A critical ethnographic methodology was employed to structure and analyze individual interview narratives of ten CÉGEP college teachers, using critical theory and critical pedagogy as philosophical underpinnings. Additionally, I examined the neoliberal marketization of education to shed some light on the conditions that influence CBE practices. \n \nThe results indicated that the conditions under which CBE persists alienate college teachers from their work and perpetuate educational, structural, and societal inequalities. Teachers’ feedback discloses that the excessive focus on CBE and the execution of its practices does not align with their beliefs of the experience education should offer students. The findings revealed disproportionate marginalizing of teachers’ voices and participation in decision-making and workplace changes due to inequalities generated by neoliberal hierarchical connections. Consequently, my research shifted teachers’ roles from reform implementers to allowing them to participate in interview dialogues about educational changes. Teachers’ voices illustrate that such collaborative initiatives could result in educational progress, equitable changes, and positive effects on professional development. These findings support the notion that more intentional collaboration among educators is critical to re-address power inequalities, eradicate undemocratic neoliberal practices and sustain educational reform. It also suggests that teachers’ involvement in critical discourse could be leveraged to work toward positive educational change. Given that little research has conducted an in-depth analysis of teachers’ views and experiences in fulfilling CBE mandates, my thesis offers insights into how teachers can deliberate and mobilize their responses to address and challenge unilateral neoliberal competency-based reforms. \n \nKeywords: competency-based education, neoliberal, critical theory, critical pedagogy, critical ethnography
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".